The Buildathon is the start of an ongoing relationship. Selection into the cohort of forty makes you a Future Caribbean alumnus. Winning makes the relationship more concrete. Either way, what you build does not stop at the demo.
The first 40 teams selected for the Global AI Buildathon are the founding cohort of Future Caribbean alumni. Whether you win on August 15 or not, your team carries that designation. It signals to the people who matter that your work has been evaluated against a serious bar, in a structured environment, with credible judges.
That signal is the entry point. Everything described on this page is built on top of it.
Every team that completes the Buildathon, win or not, receives the following.
A short profile of your team and project, hosted on futurecaribbean.com, owned by you. You control what is shown and what is private. You can update it as the work evolves. The profile becomes the canonical link you send to investors, journalists, and prospective hires when you want to reference your Buildathon participation.
A private space for the forty teams to keep talking, share progress, ask each other for help, and warn each other about the things that go wrong in the months after the event. The cohort is small enough that introductions remain meaningful for years.
When the second Buildathon runs, founding-cohort alumni get an early look at the incoming teams, an invitation to mentor, and a route to identify potential hires, co-founders, or collaborators from the new selection.
Future Caribbean is a longer-arc initiative. The Buildathon is one programme within it. Alumni shape what comes next. You will be asked. Your input will not be ceremonial.
Some teams ship something the judges and the broader Caribbean ecosystem want to see continue. For those teams, Future Caribbean does more than designate you as alumni. It puts work into helping the project keep going.
The specifics depend on what your project needs. The categories below are what we will be set up to provide. Not every team needs every category. The relationship is shaped to the work.
When your project has reached the point where a funding conversation makes sense, Future Caribbean makes warm introductions to investors who have the mandate, geography, and stage to be a real fit. Introductions are free, non-compensated, and do not depend on the investor's response.
For projects that need a real-world deployment surface, a hospital, a ministry, a bank, an operator, a regional institution, Future Caribbean introduces teams to partners we believe could pilot the work. Whether the pilot happens is between you and them.
The Caribbean technical talent pool is real and underused. Future Caribbean knows it. We make the introductions when your team is ready to grow.
When your project has a moment that warrants coverage, Future Caribbean helps you tell the story. Press relationships, social amplification, conference speaking opportunities. The work has to merit the attention. We do not manufacture moments.
Office hours with people who have built and shipped similar projects. The first cohort sets the precedent for what this looks like in practice.
Honest framing matters more than aspirational framing. So a few things this page does not promise.
The Buildathon ends August 15, 2026. The alumni relationship begins August 16, 2026.
The most active period. Each team has a structured 30-, 60-, and 90-day check-in with Future Caribbean. The check-ins are short, practical, and focused on what you need help with. This is where most of the introductions, advisory time, and tactical support gets concentrated.
The relationship moves from structured check-ins to as-needed support. You contact us when you need an introduction, a sounding board, a press push, or input on a decision. We contact you when we have something we think is relevant.
You become part of the institutional memory of Future Caribbean. You mentor the next cohort. You are the proof point in conversations with future backers, partners, and applicants. This phase is harder to design in advance because it depends on what the alumni community wants. The first cohort defines it.
Qualification is built into the programme. You do not apply separately to the alumni programme. You qualify by:
That is the entire qualification process. There is no second screening, no membership fee, no additional commitment required. The alumni designation is conferred on submission of your final project.
This is the first Buildathon. The first alumni programme. The first cohort.
The introductions, the deployment partners, the investor relationships, Future Caribbean is building these in parallel with running the event. Some of them will be in place by August 15. Some will be in place by November. Some will take longer. The first cohort is the cohort that helps shape what the alumni programme becomes.
If you want a programme with established alumni networks, named partner logos, and case studies of past winners, this is not yet that programme. It will become that programme. Joining the first cohort means you help define what the second, third, and tenth cohorts inherit.
For founders who want institutional polish, this might be too early. For founders who want to build something with the Caribbean as the substrate and have a real say in what an emerging regional programme looks like, this is the right moment.
Questions about the alumni programme that the application FAQ does not cover, write to Lily.